After a three-year silence, Friends of Dean Martinez return with their third album, ATARDECER. Mainstay Bill Elm and his new cohorts again concoct 11 instrumentals that are exceedingly cinematic, evocative of the redemption of a crisp dawn after a lonely night of desert winds. The Friends' mid-'90s beginnings aligned them with the then-burgeoning lounge music scene, but that was never an entirely comfortable or accurate fit. Eschewing surface sheen, this outfit has always reveled in a sort of gleeful exaltation of the dark side of Happy Hour. Elm's steel guitar, fuzzy around the edges, is like an old prospector who, looking for a good time on his Friday night in town, ends up drinking himself to delirium in a rooming house that shakes every time a freight train clatters by. This album is highly recommended, as are its two predecessors, SHADOW OF YOUR SMILE and RETROGRADE.